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This is the first book devoted to the phoronym, a largely overlooked grammatical category that includes measures such as "cup" in "a cup of tea", classifiers such as "head" in "ten head of cattle", and other types, all of which occur in the pseudopartitive construction. Both measures and noun classification (the defining feature of classifiers) are thought to occur in all languages, so the phoronym is a linguistic universal. This book is the first to combine the two major theoretical approaches to the topic and includes the first detailed studies of group classifiers and repeaters, as well as the first study of classifiers in Finnish and Russian. It also covers class nouns and their components - which are connected grammatically and semantically to both classifiers and gender - and discusses possible connections of classifiers with sublinguistic cognition. The analysis focuses on Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, and Thai, but Finnish, Hungarian, Tibetan, Uzbek, and other languages are also discussed.
About the author
The Author: Christopher I. Beckwith is Professor of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, where he received his Ph.D. in Uralic and Altaic studies. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1986), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), and other awards. Beckwith is the author of
Koguryo, Language of Japan's Continental Relatives (2004; second edition 2007) and numerous other books and articles.
